They were called radio-ballads, and they hymned the virtues of both work and working folk. David Jays revisits the songs and sounds of a lost world

The street shudders and whines, jangling with the sounds of drilling and tarring. Cable TV has come to town, and the workmen bring speed and dexterity to a job of questionable necessity. The sounds of a freelance writer's superfluous employment - keyboard, phone, percolator - are quieter, cardiographic indications of solitary activity.

"An honest day's work" may soon sound like a gnomic riddle. What does it mean, in our multitasking, portfolio-career days, when domesticity, parenting, even love - honey, you have to work at it - have taken on the taint of labour, while employment's monolithic centrality dissipates? Listen to the radio-ballads made 40-odd years ago by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger and you'll hear the sound of necessary work, of pick and rope and shovel.

Between 1958 and 1964, the BBC broadcast eight radio-ballads, produced by Parker, with songs by MacColl in Seeger's arrangements. In the 1950s BBC, words and music, like people, knew their place, but here documentary and art, fact and folksong were collaged into a web of impressionistic purpose. The first programme, The Ballad of John Axon (1958), commemorated the driver of a headlong engine who remained on board to warn of danger and lost his life. Axon's heroism and working world are summoned by songs, interviews and sound effects, and the mesh revealed an inspiring new form. The folk-song frame makes people into heroic archetypes, while the interviews value their intensely personal experience.

"The year was 1957, the morning bright and gay," clarions MacColl to the shiver of Seeger's mandolin, and we're off. We feel the weight and speed of the engines, recorded terrifyingly close, the scalding steam of the burst pipe flooding the microphone like static. We hear Axon's wife and colleagues explaining the man and his work, and we hear MacColl intone: "By his deeds shall ye know him." It's a thrilling, sobering epitaph, and serves for the workers in subsequent programmes about the builders of the M1 (Song of a Road), herring fishermen (Singing the Fishing) and miners (The Big Hewer). The notion of a job for life still made some sense, as did that of vocation. "Railways went through the back of your spine like 'Blackpool' went through rock," claims one speaker.

MacColl was involved with the Ramblers' Association, writing "The Manchester Ramblers' Song". It was fortunate that John Axon, too, was a keen walker, for it helps situate traditional industry within British pastoral. Fishermen relishing the sea's flickering moods, travellers passing through summertime heather, engine drivers touched by dawn, machinery cleaving to the natural world. Axon's widow recalls moonlit rambles and says, with beautiful accuracy: "Wherever we hiked, we always came back from Hope." Touched by a Bunyanesque sense of direction, the ballads make life an allegory, with rambling the pursuit that provides honest relief for honest work.

The radio-ballads look beyond Blake and Bunyan back to Piers the Plowman, William Langland's medieval allegory of besieged labour. Work has long been unmoored from the grinding calendars of church and chapel, and the present C of E desperately markets itself as a feel-good leisure opportunity. The ballads convey an unexpected religious sensibility, a purposeful Christian socialism that Tony Benn might recognise. MacColl records that Parker's benevolent Anglicanism was assaulted by the people they recorded - the cheerfully pagan road-builders, and even more the miners and travellers whose god was a harsh god, creator of a world both fair to see and hard to endure. MacColl himself, more bard than troubadour, trumpets like a baleful Old Testament prophet, asking: "What shall it profit a fisherman?" and exhorting: "Men must sweat to gain their food."

It's men that sweat in the ballads; women tend the stove and keen their loss. Only The Travelling People (1964) burrows into their experience. Although the balladeers aren't overly romantic about old labour (the Depression still shadows the speakers' memories), they are unremittingly solemn. Interviewees sometimes manage a bawdy chuckle, but MacColl remains straight-voiced until the travellers coax him into wit and mockery. The makers have a strong sense of mission - to celebrate, to explain - which brings a compensating urgency. They enjoy catalogues, whether of sailing boats (Old John, Gemini, Snowflake) or mining jobs (hewers, clippers, creeper-lads). They stud the songs with unfamiliar words, nubbly and satisfying as pebbles. The exploration of new vocabularies sours only when the travellers list the names flung at them on the road - gypsy, tinker, diddikoy.

Ballads tell ahistorical stories that chime simultaneously in the here and now but long ago and far away. MacColl, Parker and Seeger know these trades were bred in the industrial revolution and eagerly record new developments such as steam-powered fishing boats. But they trace connections into history (speaking to the miners, MacColl remembers Thucydides' account of the salt mines) and equally seem to consider that these occupations will go on for ever, stretching out to the crack of doom. The recordings breathe a timelessness that is not just that of history but of expectation. They were made just before Harold Wilson announced "the white heat of technology"; before cod wars; before Railtrack and the privations of privatisation; before the Criminal Justice Bill and protests against the Newbury bypass. The 20th century has marshalled a succession of blows to our innocence. Now miners have become an endangered species and road-builders are despoilers of the landscape. There will be more novels such as Matt Thorne's Eight Minutes Idle, set in a call-centre.

In Stephen Poliakoff's recent RSC play Tales of the City, a young BBC producer tries to inaugurate a similar project just before the second world war. "I want to make the audience live a day through the eyes of a Jewish man and his family, in Germany now," he proclaims, excited by the sensory possibilities of fact and feeling. The radio-balladeers seem to have become similarly radicalised as they developed the form, but also more pessimistic. By the final production, The Travelling People, recording the hounded "nomads of the road", MacColl's voice has lost the declamatory fervour of the early ballads and huddles into tender elegy. Instead of presenting a community at the heart of society, the subjects now are on its margins. We hear the travellers labelled "the maggots of society" and calls for them to be "eliminated". Even the rich pool of folksong on which the musicians draw has a harsher tinge: for every lyric of liberty on the road, there's a jeering cackle of prejudice. These travellers are keen-eyed jacks of all trades, lighting on fleeting scraps of work. Portfolio nomads, they are cast into a world without firm prospects, and it's our world now.

The eight radio-ballads are available on Topic Records

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